Mini Dental Implants ~ Extractions ~ Immediate Placement and Saving the Bone
Another good use for mini dental implants is when we have a failing bridge or a tooth that has had a failing root canal treatment. Our next case is a patient that came to see us after having pain with her temporary bridge. Her old bridge she told me was wobbling around and her dentist told her the post was weak and he needed to make the bridge longer…..only if we had met sooner that might not have been what she had chose to do. G8PBAUAAQB92
We can see on this x-ray (this is the x-ray she brought from her previous dentist before he removed the bridge and made it one tooth longer)the decay under the post that continues down the root on the tooth that has had the root canal treatment. The root canal tooth was very mobile (as in when I took the bridge off to assess the teeth I could move the root in the bone.
We covered all the options with the patient from a new bridge(her previous dentist has already made the decision to make a longer bridge for her that went to the canine tooth in front of the root canal tooth). I told her I thought it would not be a good idea to keep the root canal tooth since is was already mobile.
We talked about 2 traditional implants, or a few minis and single crowns on her natural teeth.
She decided to let me extract the Root canal tooth. There was enough destruction of bone on the cheek side that I explained to her that I would place some socket preservation material (a freezed dried mixture of bone) in the hole where the root was to help her body fill in that hole with good live bone so we could come back in 12 weeks and place a mini dental implant.
Here we have the socket preservation material in the extraction site. Its easy to see how plump the ridge looks. It will stay that way without caving in and will give us lots of good bone to put a mini dental implant.
2 Mini Dental Implants in place to hold a molar size crown. The mini dental implants will be shaped to allow room for her teeth to come together. We will place a Porcelain crown over the mini dental implants.
X-ray of the two mini dental implants in place.
The ghost image of where the root was will fill in with bone and in about 12 weeks we will add in another mini dental implant to support a crown.
I will continue the post with the pictures of the crowns when we get the final mini dental implant in place and the crowns back from the lab.
Paresh B Patel DDS mini dental implants